Vince Flynn THE SURVIVOR First Three Pages

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not read THE LAST MAN, this file contains spoilers.

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#15 Mitch Rapp
The Survivor
The safe house was beginning to take on the feeling of a prison for Kennedy. She’d
sat through too many of these post-operation debriefings to begin to count, but over
her thirty-plus-year career at the CIA it was safe to say the numbers were in the
triple digits. The pungent smell of cigarettes, too much coffee, not enough sleep, and
too few workouts combined to throw off an all-too-familiar smell. For her part, she
got to leave. Had to, really. As director of the CIA, she couldn’t simply vanish for a
week straight.
She spent her days locked almost entirely behind the soundproof door of her
seventh-floor office at Langley, trying to sort out the mess that had come to be
known as the Rickman Affair. And even that had raised some eyebrows. The damage
was bad, as it always was with this type of thing, but the question was how bad.
Kennedy didn’t fault Rapp for killing her Near East black ops chief. Getting
him out of Pakistan would have proved problematic, especially after Rapp had killed
that duplicitous bastard Lieutenant General Durrani, the Deputy General of
Pakistan’s ISI. Even so, had Rapp managed to keep Rickman alive, they would have
been left with a Rickman whose twisted intellect was capable of sowing so many
seeds of disinformation and dissent that the CIA would have been eating itself from
the inside out by the time he was done. No, they were all better off with Rickman out
of the picture. As Hurley was fond of saying, “Dead men tell no lies.”
They also offered no information, which was what Kennedy had been trying
to assess during her days locked behind her door. Rapp had recovered a laptop as
well as some hard drives from General Durrani’s house. They were Rickman’s, and
her best people were poring over the encrypted CIA files to see what assets,
operatives, and agents may have been compromised. One operation, due to its
current sensitivity, had her particularly worried and there were already some signs
that things might be going off the tracks, which in this particular case was an
appropriate metaphor.
“What are we going to do with him?”
Kennedy slowly closed the red file on the kitchen table, removed her glasses,
and rubbed her tired eyes.
Mike Nash set a fresh cup of tea in front of her and took a seat.
“Thank you.” After a moment, she added, “I’m not sure what we’re going to
do with him. I’ve left it up to those two for now.”
Nash looked out the sliding glass door, where night was falling on Mitch Rapp
and Stan Hurley, who were both smoking. Kennedy had forced them to go outside to
smoke. Nash couldn’t tell for sure, but they probably were also drinking bourbon. “I
don’t mean Gould. I mean, I care about what we do with him, but for the moment,
I’m more worried about what we’re going to do with Mitch.”
Kennedy was growing tired of this. She’d talked to their resident shrink
about the tension between Nash and Rapp, and for the most part they were on the
same page. Rapp was Nash’s senior by a few years, and through some pretty
impressive maneuvering, Rapp had been able to end Nash’s covert career. The how
and why were a bit complicated, but in the end it was plainly a noble gesture. Nash
had a wife and four kids, and Rapp didn’t want to see all that thrown away on some
dangerous mission that someone else could handle. Nash, for his part, felt betrayed
by Rapp. Their closeness was a natural casualty, as Rapp began to share fewer and
fewer operational details with his friend, who now spent too much time at Langley
and far too much time on Capitol Hill.
“I know you’re worried,” Kennedy said, “but you have to stop trying to
control him. Trust me, I’ve spent twenty years trying, and the best I can do is nudge
him in a general direction.”
Nash frowned. “He’s going to end up just like Stan. A bitter, lonely old man
who’s dying of lung cancer. Look at him . . . even now he can’t put those damn things
down.”
“Don’t judge, Mike,” Kennedy said with a wary tone. “He’s been through a lot.
How he chooses to go out is no one’s business other than his own.”
“But Mitch . . . it’s as plain as day. That’s the road he’s heading down.”
Kennedy thought about it for a long moment, taking a sip of tea. “We’re not
all made for white picket fences and nine-to-five jobs. He most certainly isn’t.”
“No, but each time he goes out, the odds are stacked against him.”
“I used to think so,” said Kennedy, smiling, “and then I came to a very simple
conclusion . . .”
“What’s that?”
“He’s a survivor.”